Mining the Social Web: Data Mining Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+, GitHub, and More

AMAZING book - and as you can understand from other reviews, it's an re-imagineered idea of a 'book'. I won't reiterate as it's covered by other reviewers. Only three additional comments: 1) I'm a NON-TECHIE (healthcare) and this book provides such clear guidance that I feel capable of putting it to use, with NO prior experience with, or knowledge of programming. The value of that is not that I'll start programming, however, I can think for myself when it comes to potential uses, limitations, possibilities, challenges for how I want to put this to use. 2) You should get the E-BOOK VERSION, not the paper copy as I did, as it'll automatically be up to date, which is crucial as this is an interactive book. 3) This book should be required reading for everyone. Why? We need informed customers when it comes to digital products, especially as related to the social web, to understand what it is that you are sharing - blindly for most of us. You're essentially allowing people into your house to go through your drawers and documents. There are situations were you might want that. However, be aware of the kind of access your authorizing and to whom. Matthew A. Russell - wow, well done!

I am quite surprised about the way this book presenting how to do text mining on social media. Those social media with different data format bundled with both structure and unstructured data is hard to process by a common way of text mining. But, with lots of practical source code and example, it makes quite easy for a beginner to comprehend much more detail. i think this book is quite useful for those try to conduct the text mining for commercial or marketing survey on cyber data from company facebook or twitter. Highly recommend it.

I have purchased just about every book available on social media data mining/ analytics, including the first edition of this book. What Matthew Russell has done with this second edition is amazing. With the purchase of this book, you get a fully functional virtual machine (available via download on GitHub.) As updates are made to the code for the book, you can easily pull them from GitHub. This eliminates the countless hours you spend downloading, configuring, troubleshooting, wondering if you got the right version of the needed software, etc. Within minutes you can read the book and type the code samples. Actually, the code is already there, you simply enter in some key values and watch the code run. You can then morph the code and see the effects of your changes. Mining the Social Web is exceptionally well written covering all major social media platforms. Mr. Russell is also very approachable and answers questions very quickly. I really can't say enough good things about this book and how it sets the bar high for future technical books!

Overall a good resource. Gave me enough of a background that I could get a Twitter reader up and running, which I could then modify to do the specific task that I needed to do. A bit complex to set up the operating environment that the author recommends, but instructions were clear and I was able to get it to work without too much angst.

If you've ever done work in data analysis or academic research of any kind, you'll know that gathering and managing your data to be in an acceptable format is what you do with most of your time. I love that Matthew A. Russell took the time to write a book specifically for working with the data available on social networks. If you ever do work with Natural Language Processing, where you need large amounts of text in order to get your research done, social networks are a fantastic place to get that. You can do amazing things with reading what's put on social networks for example trend analysis. I'm doing research now in NLP, and using what I learned in Mining the Social Web, I started collecting data from Twitter for me to perform my analysis on. This book really gets you exactly what it says it does. You'll learn to work with the APIs for various social network websites. There's no extra cruft or fluff. You know exactly what you're getting and the book walks you through everything very cleanly at a very manageable pace.

This is a great tour of the APIs provided by some of the larger social platforms, and helpful commentary about some of the data munging and analysis steps required to do something interesting. The clear and easy to follow examples are further enhanced through the accompanying virtual machine of the book, allowing you to escape the headache of installing, configuring, and selecting the right version of all the supporting software and libraries. I also had the pleasure of interviewing Matthew Russell about this book on The Data Skeptic Podcast where we had the chance to have an interesting discussion about the book.

This is based on Python 2. Quite funny that the authors and the publishers hide this information on their catalog and on the cover of the book. Think again if you are looking for a Python 3+ version. Otherwise the book is very informative, a little too verbose with well explained examples... I am a little disappointed with the purchase...

facebook, linkedin apis change. Therefore, chapters in the book are useless. The first chapter about twitter is okay. To me, the author knows about twitter better than other social media platform. I think the book should be changed to twitter data mining instead.